In the past, we primarily communicated with people on a regular basis through face time and phone conversations. With the widespread adoption of email usage, many people, including myself, use email as their primary mode of communication. Email is an important tool for building relationship so take it very serious. I can't tell you how many emails that I receive from people that are crafted poorly with grammatical and spelling mistakes. While I know that email is not supposed to be as formal as a letter or regular conversation, however, any form of communication is a reflection on you. Obviously, it depends on your audience or purpose of the message on how formal you would like it to be written. Whether I am writing to my friends or clients, I still take the time to craft a properly written email. While I admit that I am sort of a perfectionist, it still shouldn't matter because the way you communicate can tell people a lot about your character.
I try to personalize every email that I send by addressing each person with his/her first name. People will appreciate that you took the time to customize the email. Also, I almost always end the email with a nice sign off such as Thanks, Talk to you soon, and Look forward to seeing you.
As you are building relationships with people via email and start to learn their styles, you will have a good sense of how formal you should craft your emails. Also, many times our emails are just replys to someone else's email. Sometimes your response doesn't need to be as formal. Just feel it out and use the appropriate format. When you are starting an email communication, that is when you should really pay attention to how formal you should be.
A great way to communicate through email is to set up a newsletter through a service such as Constant Contact. I have been using this service for several years and have been very happy with it. It gives me a chance to communicate with my network all at once and in an easy to use format. While an email newsletter is great, you should not forget to still communicate one on one with people.
No one is perfect so you are going to make mistakes in your emails. Make sure to use spell check and to review what you have written before you send it out. Recently, I mistakenly sent out an email with the wrong first name in my sign off. I admit that I needed to send the same email format to more than one person. So, I just copied the text, changed the greeting, but forgot to change the sign off. While I was embarrassed, there was nothing that I could do except to make sure that I am more careful in the future. Many times we write emails while we are in a hurry so things get missed. Rather than rushing an email, we should probably slow down and give ourselves the proper time to make sure that it is written correct.
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